Using religion to fill an empty world
When I was in Germany two summers ago, I visited Peterskirche, one of the most stunning churches in Munich. I was awestruck by the shimmering gold of its high altar, the swirling colours of its Baroque ceiling frescoes, and the sunlight streaming through its windows. Despite its expansive and airy interior, there was a fullness there, as though the church was charged from wall-to-wall with the presence of the divine. And yet, if I had visited just a year later, I would have felt around me only empty space.
The story behind this change is convoluted, but I should begin by establishing that my relationship with Christianity is a strange one. I was not raised in a religious environment; in fact, I was surrounded by rigid atheism until I moved away for university two months ago. But I always held a muffled belief that there was something more to the world than the material—something unseeable, and yet perhaps more real than anything else.
In retrospect, there is an explanation behind this lurking belief. For many years, the world was an empty place to me, a vast space lacking meaning or direction. I learned later that this was rooted in my troubled mental health, which has been with me since I was too young to know it as anything other than a vague sense of strangeness, as if one of the wires in my brain was faulty. That wire might have always been there, but only when I was thirteen did it start to flicker, and then spark, and then burst into a flame that would raze through the rest of my life. I began a journey downwards—at first, I thought I had only tripped, but it soon became terribly clear that I was falling down a hill, and then down a cliff to which I could see no bottom.
From then on, I lived in a state that I still don’t have the vocabulary to describe—it was bleak and disturbing, excruciatingly silent. A great shadow swept through the world and stripped it of its contents, stripped the ground of its vegetation and the sky of its stars. All around me was empty space, and I was suffocated by the sheer volume of it.
* * *
To cope with this terrifying new place, I looked to things outside of it—things I thought might exist somewhere beyond its atmosphere. And I reached out and found something that reached back and found me: God. He was the first sign of life I had encountered in a world otherwise barren, and the more I learned about Him, the deeper my desire to believe grew. He was constant and unmoving, always offering unconditional and endless love—He was a hiding place to which I could go just as I was, without needing to cover any part of myself.
My life began to rest on a foundation of complete dependence on what I knew was the sole source of light in the darkness. My faith in God gave me comfort, security, and relief. The pain of the world was only temporal, only material. I hid away from it in the sanctuary I had built around my belief, and all the terrestrial suffering fell away to reveal light. That light poured through the world, and just like the Flood, it swept away all that was rotten and painful and made everything anew.
* * *
I never wanted, nor expected, to lose this faith. Being stripped of the thing that formed the structure of my life, the base from which I understood and accepted the world in all its difficulty and terror, was unimaginable to me.
But it happened. The ultimate collapse was the culmination of a long accumulation of doubt, fed to me by my skeptical family and friends. But, shrouded as I was in my desperate dependence on my belief, I was blind to its decay—and so, when everything did give way, when my sanctuary crumbled beneath its own weight, I was shocked. The evidence had pierced the illusion; I could no longer believe in something that centuries of reason and science had disproved.
The scope of the disaster became clear only when I pulled myself up and began to survey the rubble. I was consumed by an acute, pervading sense of loss. The light that had filled the world vanished from it in an instant, leaving in its wake that same empty space.
* * *
If I had visited Peterskirche last summer, after my faith had faded, I would have been gutted by its vacancy. Its beauty would have been made nauseating by its lack of life. It would have been a temple built for a dead thing, a memory of a vanished light.
I am still grappling with what it means for the world to be an empty space. What can I fill it with? Can I fill it with anything at all? Or should I just accept it for what it is—space without structure, space without explanation, space without meaning?
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